“The Raspberry Pi and Beagle family have done a lot to bring new people into the world of embedded development, and that is a wonderful thing,” says Scott Garman, Technical Evangelist, Intel Open Source Technology Center. “As the embedded community grows and people seek out new projects to pursue, they are inevitably going to run into limitations on one platform or another. Just about every embedded board in the marketplace has something unique to offer, and the MinnowBoard will be a compelling choice for many applications, particularly those that require high I/O throughput.”
MinnowBoard is an Intel Atom-based platform equipped with interfaces like SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, and PCI Express, and is suited for applications such as Networking Attached Storage (NAS) and Network security, Garman says (Figure 3). “Professional embedded developers working on commercial products will like the fact that the MinnowBoard is open hardware, and can be customized without having to sign any Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs),” he adds.
refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/